You're a website owner/designer who wants to get as many people to see your site as you possibly can (so that they then go on and buy stuff/click on banners/laugh at your jokes/post first).
Someone comes to you and says, "Listen Mr Webmaster, we're sick and tired of people not cooperating. Put some scripting into your page which makes your customers disappear if they have the temerity to not want to see sites as your designers dream of making and persist in not wanting to spend a couple of hours downloading our new bloat"
and you say,
"No, bollocks, I want as many people as possible to see my page/buy my books/read my posts, and if my designers can't be arsed to make a page that the biggest possible audience can see, then that's my problem. It's nothing to do with my customers."
Imagine a bookshop not letting you buy their books until you'd completed a literature degree. Do you think people would go to another store?
Do you know of any sites where the same content CANNOT be found elsewhere?
Do you think these sites are going to make it actively difficult for potential customers to come and see their stuff?
Jon says, "We know that gamers are the new prophets and story-tellers of society, that gaming is approaching a universal generational experience. So gamers are important. It seems clear that the future is in their hands."
Can anybody thing of any other universal generational experiences? I know I can - and ones that are far more universal. But no one ever equates them with the future of society.
I mean, what about books? what about TV? what about mass-brand shops?
I'd be more likely to pay attention to a thesis on the power of the universal Starbucks experience, or the way half the under-twelves of the Western World have all read Harry Potter, or how every one in the UK can sing the theme tune to the Bodyform advert despite the fact it hasn't run on TV for three years.
I know computer games are close to many/.er's heart, but this sort of connection is ridiculous. Game designers are no more important to society than Gygax, or the guy who invented monopoly.
It's not a statement of preference, but I have to say the stowaway has made a big difference to my life.
I'm a journalist, and travel extensively. While it's nice to have a ThinkPad with me, they are heavy, take enormous amounts of adaptors, rechargers and cables to work and are expensive to replace. It's a big hassle for email and text editing enough to write a thousand words a day.
Since the summer I've been using a visor and the stowaway, with a Xircom modem in the top and pEdit inside. The whole thing fits into my pocket, takes AAA batteries and if I lose any of the bits costs less than a hundred pounds to replace.
I can touch type on the Stowaway with no problems, and I now carry one less bag on planes. If you travel a lot, that alone makes a huge difference. We're even looking at kitting all our reporters with them. Why pay £1500 for a laptop that's only needed for text?
If only PalmOS came with a word count function as standard.
"Gaming" is no more a culture than "Cars" or "Food" or "Music" or "Technology".
It's just the starting point for lots of little cultures. Quake Arena is one. Everquest is another. Guys bragging over their new PS2s is a third.
My little sister goes on a lot about Pokemon
Hence, to say that "gaming is becoming our ascendant culture" is a bit odd. "A lot of people play some form of electronic game" is better, "Democratic capitalism, based on a globalist economic viewpoint, built around a primarily but not solely Judeo-Christian post-Bastille work ethic is becoming our ascendent culture" might be better still.
Not that many people has a NES anyway. Maybe everyone YOU know, but who are they exactly?
>If this was Linux I'd just fix up a new kernel or maybe just a module.
Experiment for you to try: find an ordinary user and get them to install a nic. First in Windows with p'n'p and then with Linux. Tell them to "fix up a new kernel". Witness Fear, Uncertainty and then Doubt. Then realise why Windows is the more popular.
their MousemanWheel is very nice. Wireless and the super big-n-chunky shape. Extra buttons and all that.
on the big-n-chunky issue - if you are not using an ergonomic mouse, why not? makes a v.big difference...heresy to say here but I was once shown around the mouse labs at Redmond: very impressive research. Not all at MS is bad.
well, no. It'd just be up to the developer to ensure the CD had enough of the latest drivers on board to let it cope with enough setups, and a boot process that checks the hardware for type first.
It's a bit of a shag, admittedly, but is easy enough.
I think you're missing the point. It's not to promote Linux as a game playing platform: it's using linux as a very small footprint on the top of which a game can play *and*nothing*else*
If you boot a machine off a cd-rom solely to play a game, all you need of the OS is the bits dedicated to making the game work. Happily with Linux you can knock all the extraneous parts out, leaving plenty of system resources for the game itself. Loading windows brings all sorts of irrelevent (in terms of playing the game) crap onto the system.
This is just neat system optimisation, and currently Linux is a nice, cheap, OS, simple way to do it. Nothing more
It makes sense for games guys to do it this way as suddenly there's no such thing as a Windows game or a Linux game or a, ahem, FreeBSD game, but rather just x86 games.
yup - spot on. Enough of this America America Uber Alles cobblers.
It's odd that a medium that's meant to be global and universal and set to create some Global Village and other suchlike bollocks is populated by people who think that because all the sites they read are in English, the whole thing is based around them.
E-business people are the worst: The world does not revolve around San Jose. Most people don't even know the way to San Jose. But that doesn't stop valleydwellers talking about Europe as "that place a year behind us."
For all their smarts they are rather ignorant.
Can we have a bit more of a global outlook, people?
playing devil's advocate here - I'm interested in the aspect of why this/linux/napster etc etc is all to do with taking on Big X.
Every other story on/. seems to be how x technology spells the end for the dominent publishing/music/OS business.
So here's a question for y'all:
What things are these big companies actually good for? Under what circumstances - Right Now - do you agree with Big X? i don't mean if they did this or that, but actually right now...what good things do you see Microsoft, record labels, publishers etc doing that others are not?
this argument always reminds me of my parent's generation saying they invented rock and roll - being teenagers in the sixties and all.
bollocks. it was the old guys who sold the records.
it's always the "old farts" who do the rebelling really: they're the ones with the money/business sense/influence/access to mass amounts of mememaking media that make the differences.
The net is just the same. All this groundbreaking teenage open media madness is facilitated by the old farts - without them, their nice backbone making,computer building,satellite launching, venture funding fartiness we'd all be just writing on neighbourhood walls.
one thing I've noticed when I come across the pond to the US - and especially Silicon Valley - is the Long-Hour culture...and how it is so much a complete lie.
People may well be in the office for 18 hours a day, but how much is actually working? Perhaps the need for change is not for less tech, but more sensible management telling you to just do the job quickly and then GO HOME - placing more emphasis on getting it done and less on being seen taking ages over it.
China is no more a communist country than the US. In fact, if you've ever lived there you'll find its probably more capitalist.
Anyway, the Chinese govt isn't embracing Linux because it is Open Source. It's embracing it because it is FREE. As in Beer.
the 50 quid a machine that Microsoft charge OEMs is a lot of money for the average Chinese. Multiply it by the number of PCs that belong to the Chinese govt and the effort they spend promoting Linux is well spent.
ok full disclosure: I'm a journalist on The Times of London, owned by Rupert Murdoch.
The problem here is more one of a perception of conspiricy. Katz (and many many others) seem to think that because news or opinions are chosen by Men In Suits it is inherently dodgy.
This just isn't true. We in newspapers choose the news we print based on newsworthyness to our audience: in national papers that means a national audience, in specialist press (Slashdot, say) that's a specialist audience.
This means a few things:
1. Just because you might think something is important, and it doesn't get printed, DOES NOT mean there is a movement to keep that news secret. It probably isn't either true or interesting
2. The content of the media is NOT controlled by its owners. Murdoch? Never met/heard from/been influenced by him. No one here has. The owners just don't have the time.
3. In general, the journalist does know more about the subject than the average punter: that's what makes them more placed to choose what is important for people to read.
4. We also have a duty - and it is taken seriously - to be bias free and fair.
5. Conversely, the average website contributor just doesn't: Open media written by the many with have too small a signal/noise ratio to be of any use.
reading epinions or deja may be fun, but I'd rather get a review from an expert in the field, fully informed and dedicated to fair reporting
paper. For a simple, but perhaps irrational reason: a book can be cherished. It can be loved, annotated, stained with strawberry juice on a picnic, passed to a friend. It can decorate a room, be read on a train, in a bath, on the beach. It can be imbued with memories, and stained by its (and the reader's) lives.
It's your first novel. Let it be something you can hold.
Leave the pseudopolitical posturing, or the false economy of self publishing for a later work.
the problem here is not anything to do with an impending.com meltdown. It's more to do with the fact that the launch version of Boo.com was possibly the worst commercial website in history.
IMHO, It was almost impossible to view without a T1 line, very tricky to buy from, sold clothes (clothes! who's going to buy clothes online?) and crashed your browser 4 times out of 5.
the Euro press, myself included, were predicting its downfall almost immediately after its launch.
Sadly, though, there is a growing feeling that Boo's massive cost (£100m) has poisoned the b2c market. No one will ever invest in that space again, and the entrepreneurs here are pretty upset at boo for that.
America only owns most of the internet used by Americans - ask a Frenchman, Japanese, Korean, Arab who owns their internet and they'll give you a different answer.
It's like saying Russia owns the sky because there are more there than anywhere else
face it. The only reason people are so excited by Napster et al is that they can get stuff for free.
So why is anyone surprised that artists get upset about it? Sure, the labels are over charging for CDs, sure they're nasty evil megacorps, sure they wouldn't piss on the artists head if their hair was on fire.
But just as MP3 offers the chance for artists to bypass the label, Napster just allows us to get stuff for free - and that is no use to the important person, the artist themselves.
MP3 - or at least a secure version - may be a good idea (in that it frees the artist and makes for cheaper music).
and the big news is a) it's an Intel Chip - they dumped AMD yesterday. and b) the NVIDIA chip does not exist yet. It's vapour. but they think it'll do 300 million polygons a second.
oh, and it comes out Autumn 2001 at an undisclosed price.
I'm in a weird position here: I'm the internet reporter for the Times of London - one of the oldest papers in the world - so I can sort of see what Katz is ranting on about here: I think he's very wrong on a few counts, though.
In recent years, newspapers have remained graphically impaired. They seem oblivious to the graphic revolution that has swept magazines and is spreading through the Web. Papers continue to cover new media technologies and popular culture poorly, alienating young and future audiences. They have ceded good writing to magazines, publishing and websites.
Graphics: pictures, you may have heard, are worth a thousand words. Not so in the newspaper world. It takes a whole department of graphics people all day to build a graphic. a few minutes to write some words. How do you file a graphic from a warzone? besides - do you really want news in simple pictures? what are you? stupid? read the words...there's more info there. new tech and culture: not true. it's just that news editors are very picky as to what stories are newsworthy to the general reader: that means it must be relevent to the greatest number of people. Sad for slashdot readers to realise, but new tech - the cutting edge geeky stuff that we all like - is mostly utterly irrelevant to most people. It's true...who - and think honestly - really cares about most of the stuff posted here apart from those of us who come here? Popular culture is the same. It has to be truly popular - not just what Katz likes.
Papers seem seem almost stupefyingly oblivious to the fact that they aren't in the breaking news business anymore. Fifteen to 24 hours after CNN and innumerable websites reported that George W.Bush would soundly thump John McCain in South Carolina, most newspapers reported the news on page one the next morning as if none of their readers had heard it before, despite the fact that almost all of them had.
A good point, but a little overstated. The headline news may have possibly hit you from lots of sources - tv, radio, web - but a) how many people just get the paper and b) the real value is from the other stuff - the analysis, the op-ed, the other stories that CNN (who, imho, are possibly the worst, most parochial, most self serving news organ I've ever seen in a free country) failed to bother with. The wider picture: International news, for example.
As the Net and Web spawn ferocious and idiosyncratic commentary, democratizing opinion all over the country, newspapers cling to stuffy and elitist op-ed pages, where opinion is generally confined to a "left" and "right" and voice usually given to elite claques of pundits, academics, authors and CEO's.
They're there BECAUSE they're elite. If I want to hear the opinion of the man-in-the-street, I'll go to the pub. If I want to hear what someone with influence, experience, and knowledge thinks, I'll read a paper. Why is this bad?
Newspapers are also struggling to define evolving definitions of culture, leisure time, recreation and amusement. Opera, classical music, hard cover books, art museums are one kind of culture. But there are new kinds - elaborate and creative gaming and video cultures, creative coding, the booming business of Web architecture and design, proliferating weblogs (hives of individual opinion and expression), vast messaging systems and services like AIM and ICQ, collaborative global information-and-software sharing movements like Linux.
all true - but then again, it would still be true if written by the lead writer of Pig Farmers Weekly. How is creative coding more newsworthy than, say, creative chicken plucking. Sorry guys - everyone thinks their profession is madly important. Truth is, everyone is equally right, and equally wrong. And for most people, a semen stained dress, or the shenanigins of some starlet are more important and just plain more interesting than the social phenom of Linux. Newspapers are for general readers. Their content must be of interest to all.
you're not making sense...how does the ownership of a site make any difference when the site itself is created by its users.
I don't want to denigrate the good Cmdr, Hemos et al, but their role is actually quite limited to keeping the thing running...it's the users that make the content. VA linux - or anyone else -can't change any of that.
If the quality has gone downhill because of increased traffic, that isn't because andover is driving the traffic here - just that slashdot is good, and people just want to come along and join in.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of it...
You're a website owner/designer who wants to get as many people to see your site as you possibly can (so that they then go on and buy stuff/click on banners/laugh at your jokes/post first).
Someone comes to you and says, "Listen Mr Webmaster, we're sick and tired of people not cooperating. Put some scripting into your page which makes your customers disappear if they have the temerity to not want to see sites as your designers dream of making and persist in not wanting to spend a couple of hours downloading our new bloat"
and you say,
"No, bollocks, I want as many people as possible to see my page/buy my books/read my posts, and if my designers can't be arsed to make a page that the biggest possible audience can see, then that's my problem. It's nothing to do with my customers."
Imagine a bookshop not letting you buy their books until you'd completed a literature degree. Do you think people would go to another store?
Do you know of any sites where the same content CANNOT be found elsewhere?
Do you think these sites are going to make it actively difficult for potential customers to come and see their stuff?
nope. didn't think so.
Jon says, "We know that gamers are the new prophets and story-tellers of society, that gaming is approaching a universal generational experience. So gamers are important. It seems clear that the future is in their hands."
/.er's heart, but this sort of connection is ridiculous. Game designers are no more important to society than Gygax, or the guy who invented monopoly.
Can anybody thing of any other universal generational experiences? I know I can - and ones that are far more universal. But no one ever equates them with the future of society.
I mean, what about books? what about TV? what about mass-brand shops?
I'd be more likely to pay attention to a thesis on the power of the universal Starbucks experience, or the way half the under-twelves of the Western World have all read Harry Potter, or how every one in the UK can sing the theme tune to the Bodyform advert despite the fact it hasn't run on TV for three years.
I know computer games are close to many
It's not a statement of preference, but I have to say the stowaway has made a big difference to my life.
I'm a journalist, and travel extensively. While it's nice to have a ThinkPad with me, they are heavy, take enormous amounts of adaptors, rechargers and cables to work and are expensive to replace. It's a big hassle for email and text editing enough to write a thousand words a day.
Since the summer I've been using a visor and the stowaway, with a Xircom modem in the top and pEdit inside. The whole thing fits into my pocket, takes AAA batteries and if I lose any of the bits costs less than a hundred pounds to replace.
I can touch type on the Stowaway with no problems, and I now carry one less bag on planes. If you travel a lot, that alone makes a huge difference. We're even looking at kitting all our reporters with them. Why pay £1500 for a laptop that's only needed for text?
If only PalmOS came with a word count function as standard.
I don't think so: have you ever watched anyone play a video game? It's pretty dull.
And playing the game is participation, even of a seditary sort.
Video games might be turning us into a slightly fatter society, but one of spectators? nah
"Gaming" is no more a culture than "Cars" or "Food" or "Music" or "Technology".
It's just the starting point for lots of little cultures. Quake Arena is one. Everquest is another. Guys bragging over their new PS2s is a third.
My little sister goes on a lot about Pokemon
Hence, to say that "gaming is becoming our ascendant culture" is a bit odd. "A lot of people play some form of electronic game" is better, "Democratic capitalism, based on a globalist economic viewpoint, built around a primarily but not solely Judeo-Christian post-Bastille work ethic is becoming our ascendent culture" might be better still.
Not that many people has a NES anyway. Maybe everyone YOU know, but who are they exactly?
>If this was Linux I'd just fix up a new kernel or maybe just a module.
Experiment for you to try: find an ordinary user and get them to install a nic. First in Windows with p'n'p and then with Linux. Tell them to "fix up a new kernel". Witness Fear, Uncertainty and then Doubt. Then realise why Windows is the more popular.
their MousemanWheel is very nice. Wireless and the super big-n-chunky shape. Extra buttons and all that.
on the big-n-chunky issue - if you are not using an ergonomic mouse, why not? makes a v.big difference...heresy to say here but I was once shown around the mouse labs at Redmond: very impressive research. Not all at MS is bad.
well, no. It'd just be up to the developer to ensure the CD had enough of the latest drivers on board to let it cope with enough setups, and a boot process that checks the hardware for type first.
It's a bit of a shag, admittedly, but is easy enough.
I think you're missing the point. It's not to promote Linux as a game playing platform: it's using linux as a very small footprint on the top of which a game can play *and*nothing*else*
If you boot a machine off a cd-rom solely to play a game, all you need of the OS is the bits dedicated to making the game work. Happily with Linux you can knock all the extraneous parts out, leaving plenty of system resources for the game itself. Loading windows brings all sorts of irrelevent (in terms of playing the game) crap onto the system.
This is just neat system optimisation, and currently Linux is a nice, cheap, OS, simple way to do it. Nothing more
It makes sense for games guys to do it this way as suddenly there's no such thing as a Windows game or a Linux game or a, ahem, FreeBSD game, but rather just x86 games.
a cambridge man, right?
yup - spot on. Enough of this America America Uber Alles cobblers.
It's odd that a medium that's meant to be global and universal and set to create some Global Village and other suchlike bollocks is populated by people who think that because all the sites they read are in English, the whole thing is based around them.
E-business people are the worst: The world does not revolve around San Jose. Most people don't even know the way to San Jose. But that doesn't stop valleydwellers talking about Europe as "that place a year behind us."
For all their smarts they are rather ignorant.
Can we have a bit more of a global outlook, people?
ooh Stephen you big rebel you...
/. seems to be how x technology spells the end for the dominent publishing/music/OS business.
playing devil's advocate here - I'm interested in the aspect of why this/linux/napster etc etc is all to do with taking on Big X.
Every other story on
So here's a question for y'all:
What things are these big companies actually good for? Under what circumstances - Right Now - do you agree with Big X? i don't mean if they did this or that, but actually right now...what good things do you see Microsoft, record labels, publishers etc doing that others are not?
just wondered
ah, but then again:
the cure recommended so far is for everyone to upgrade to IE5.5 as soon as possible
Now THAT'S marketing.
this argument always reminds me of my parent's generation saying they invented rock and roll - being teenagers in the sixties and all.
bollocks. it was the old guys who sold the records.
it's always the "old farts" who do the rebelling really: they're the ones with the money/business sense/influence/access to mass amounts of mememaking media that make the differences.
The net is just the same. All this groundbreaking teenage open media madness is facilitated by the old farts - without them, their nice backbone making,computer building,satellite launching, venture funding fartiness we'd all be just writing on neighbourhood walls.
one thing I've noticed when I come across the pond to the US - and especially Silicon Valley - is the Long-Hour culture...and how it is so much a complete lie.
People may well be in the office for 18 hours a day, but how much is actually working? Perhaps the need for change is not for less tech, but more sensible management telling you to just do the job quickly and then GO HOME - placing more emphasis on getting it done and less on being seen taking ages over it.
there's going to be a misunderstanding here...
China is no more a communist country than the US. In fact, if you've ever lived there you'll find its probably more capitalist.
Anyway, the Chinese govt isn't embracing Linux because it is Open Source. It's embracing it because it is FREE. As in Beer.
the 50 quid a machine that Microsoft charge OEMs is a lot of money for the average Chinese. Multiply it by the number of PCs that belong to the Chinese govt and the effort they spend promoting Linux is well spent.
ok full disclosure: I'm a journalist on The Times of London, owned by Rupert Murdoch.
The problem here is more one of a perception of conspiricy. Katz (and many many others) seem to think that because news or opinions are chosen by Men In Suits it is inherently dodgy.
This just isn't true. We in newspapers choose the news we print based on newsworthyness to our audience: in national papers that means a national audience, in specialist press (Slashdot, say) that's a specialist audience.
This means a few things:
1. Just because you might think something is important, and it doesn't get printed, DOES NOT mean there is a movement to keep that news secret.
It probably isn't either true or interesting
2. The content of the media is NOT controlled by its owners. Murdoch? Never met/heard from/been influenced by him. No one here has. The owners just don't have the time.
3. In general, the journalist does know more about the subject than the average punter: that's what makes them more placed to choose what is important for people to read.
4. We also have a duty - and it is taken seriously - to be bias free and fair.
5. Conversely, the average website contributor just doesn't: Open media written by the many with have too small a signal/noise ratio to be of any use.
reading epinions or deja may be fun, but I'd rather get a review from an expert in the field, fully informed and dedicated to fair reporting
paper.
For a simple, but perhaps irrational reason: a book can be cherished. It can be loved, annotated, stained with strawberry juice on a picnic, passed to a friend. It can decorate a room, be read on a train, in a bath, on the beach. It can be imbued with memories, and stained by its (and the reader's) lives.
It's your first novel. Let it be something you can hold.
Leave the pseudopolitical posturing, or the false economy of self publishing for a later work.
the problem here is not anything to do with an impending .com meltdown. It's more to do with the fact that the launch version of Boo.com was possibly the worst commercial website in history.
IMHO, It was almost impossible to view without a T1 line, very tricky to buy from, sold clothes (clothes! who's going to buy clothes online?) and crashed your browser 4 times out of 5.
the Euro press, myself included, were predicting its downfall almost immediately after its launch.
Sadly, though, there is a growing feeling that Boo's massive cost (£100m) has poisoned the b2c market. No one will ever invest in that space again, and the entrepreneurs here are pretty upset at boo for that.
America only owns most of the internet used by Americans - ask a Frenchman, Japanese, Korean, Arab who owns their internet and they'll give you a different answer.
It's like saying Russia owns the sky because there are more there than anywhere else
face it. The only reason people are so excited by Napster et al is that they can get stuff for free.
:-)
So why is anyone surprised that artists get upset about it? Sure, the labels are over charging for CDs, sure they're nasty evil megacorps, sure they wouldn't piss on the artists head if their hair was on fire.
But just as MP3 offers the chance for artists to bypass the label, Napster just allows us to get stuff for free - and that is no use to the important person, the artist themselves.
MP3 - or at least a secure version - may be a good idea (in that it frees the artist and makes for cheaper music).
Napster, however, is just theft.
still, I do like free music
and the big news is
a) it's an Intel Chip - they dumped AMD yesterday.
and
b) the NVIDIA chip does not exist yet. It's vapour. but they think it'll do 300 million polygons a second.
oh, and it comes out Autumn 2001 at an undisclosed price.
you're not making sense...how does the ownership of a site make any difference when the site itself is created by its users.
I don't want to denigrate the good Cmdr, Hemos et al, but their role is actually quite limited to keeping the thing running...it's the users that make the content. VA linux - or anyone else -can't change any of that.
If the quality has gone downhill because of increased traffic, that isn't because andover is driving the traffic here - just that slashdot is good, and people just want to come along and join in.
while we're all getting nostalgic this Sunday, how about a vote of thanks for Uncle Clive and his ZX range?
Half the UK geekverse must have learnt their stuff on them...rubber keys! jet set willy! cyan, magenta, symbol shift!
horace*goes*skiing*
child of the eighties, me.